Rubicon Project Buys Mobile Ad Start-Up Mobsmith for $10 Million

Rubicon Project, one of the higher-profile players in the ad tech universe, has picked up Mobsmith, a mobile ad start-up.

Sources say Rubicon paid around $10 million for the two-year-old company.

Rubicon helps publishers manage and optimize their display ads via “real time” buying, and the pitch is that they’ll now be able to do that with mobile ads, too — though the still-nascent mobile ad business has yet to fully embrace that kind of technology.

Rubicon’s rivals include Pubmatic and Google’s AdMeld. In September 2010, it picked up ad tech assets from News Corp., which also owns this site. Mobsmith raised a reported $575,000 in July 2010.